Montreal

My husband and I spent the long weekend in Montreal, making the trip 1) our first vacation, by ourselves, not involving family, since we got married--which really makes it our honeymoon, and 2) his first trip out of the country. Yes, he lived in San Diego, not 30 miles from Mexico, for all those years and never made it across the border.

We had a great time. It was bitter cold (I don't think the temperatures ever made it into the double digits), but we expected that. And there was less snow on the ground there than there still is in my backyard. The highlight of the trip was, of course, our two dinners out. We did the touristy stuff, saw the museums, walked around the old part of the city, but it was too cold for more than the bare minimum of aimless wandering, and the meals really were awesome.

Things to Know About Montreal:

1. You don't need to know French. It helps, of course, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover my husband remembered enough high school French to be able to tell the waiter that I was probably going to order him the rabbit. Also all the signs are in French. But everyone also speaks English (though usually they'll start off in French, and keep going unless you ask them to switch), and a stop sign is a stop sign, even if it says "Arret" instead of "Stop."

2. The US dollar and the Canadian dollar are about the same. There may be two cents' difference.

3. It's really cold in winter. But they keep the streets crystal clear.

4. We stayed at the cutest B&B, Absolument Montreal. Our room came with a kitchenette (including mini-fridge stocked with free sodas and water), a vestibule, and a hot tub. (Which was outdoors, so I didn't use it. I wasn't about to brave zero-degree night temperatures, even for a hot tub.) Best of all, the room came with a full three-course breakfast, served to us in our room, personally, by the owner. Tea and coffee and fresh orange juice, with a cheese/charcuterie plate to start, followed by something hot--eggs benedict with smoked salmon on day 1, a croque monsieur on a croissant on day 2--followed by fresh fruit and yogurt and pastries. In our room. At whatever time we wanted. So that was pretty awesome.

5. The dining really is top notch.

Warning: during our two dinners, we ate things that may offend squeamish readers. If you're one of those, stop here.

Dinner 1: DNA

One of the Top 5 meals of my life. Definitely #1 with my husband.

This is exactly the kind of restaurant that I love. Hip, great vibe, relaxed, great wine list, amazing food. And none of those things suffers at the hands of any others. DNA has one of the best wine lists in Montreal, specializing in Canadian wine. For some reasons, Quebec hasn't yet caught on that Canada (particularly British Columbia) is making some world-class wines. Their wine lists and wine stores stock a great selection of French wines, but not much else. DNA is trying to change that, and I noticed that their wine list included one of the wines that I fell in love with in Vancouver during my road trip (see blog post about that wine here). Naturally I had to go there, and drink it.

Awesomeness, in order:
1. Decor. Red and orange with really interesting lighting. Sounds tacky, but they did it just right. And they had these great orange bowl sinks in the bathrooms.
2. Bottles of Canadian wine were half off before 7 pm. We got there long before our reservation at 8:30, to hang at the bar, and so I was able to get the bottle of wine I really wanted at a reasonable price--only a few dollars above retail. (See aforementioned blog post.)
3. They seated us early, because we were there.
4. The menu. We ordered:

Pig's ear. (really a pate)

Horse heart tartare.

Housemade charcuterie.

Cornmeal-encrusted rabbit, baked in a cast-iron pan.

Piglet.

Let's take a pause here to appreciate, and celebrate, the fact that we ate horse heart tartare. That is exactly what it sounds like: raw horse heart, chopped fine and served with herbs and things. You can't eat horse in the US for a variety of reasons (even though it's perfectly legal), primarily because for most people, the idea of eating horse is repugnant. Similar to eating dog, or cat. But horse is eaten widely in most other parts of the world--it's usually considered a delicacy, and in fact, much of the world's horsemeat comes from the US. Slaughtered here, and exported. It's much lighter and leaner than beef, softer, tastes sweeter, is a beautiful brilliant red color, and it's free of tuberculosis and tapeworms, thus safer than beef to eat raw.

And it was delicious.

(If you're offended by that, I'm sorry. Take comfort in the fact I won't be eating more horse any time soon.)

That, and the cornmeal-crusted rabbit, were the culinary highlights. The rabbit meat was very light and delicate, almost white--it was definitely farmed rabbit. I've eated wild rabbit before and it was far stringier and gamier. My piglet (really part of a piglet leg, slow-braised and served with parsnips and turnips) was moist and yummy, but paled in comparison.

Our second bottle of wine was nearly as enjoyable as the first: Road 13 Pinot Noir.

At the end of the meal, there were surprise fireworks.

Day 2: Au Pied du Cochon

When I planned the trip, I thought Au Pied du Cochon would be the best meal, and DNA merely a warm-up. In reality, it was almost opposite.

I say "almost" because our entree catapulted an otherwise unmemorable meal into the storytelling stratosphere.

Here is a picture of our entree:

That is an entire pig's head, roasted, with a lobster shoved through the top.

The entire pig's head. Ears, tongue, nose and all. To eat it, you have to cut into its face.

Here's another view:

Yes, we ate pig face.

It was served on a big wooden cutting board, with a steak knife impaled through the top of its head, anchoring it to the board. Half a lobster was then impaled on a wooden skewer, and also shoved through the top of its head. The lobster claw was arranged coming out of its mouth, along with an artfully arranged smear of mashed potatoes. The effect was as if a mutant lobster had attacked the pig through its brain and out its mouth, while the pig bled and vomited mashed potatoes.

Served with a bowl of pig head and lobster juice for dipping, of course.

We couldn't eat it for at least five minutes after it was presented. At least half the restaurant stopped eating and came over to us to take pictures.

Then it took us another five minutes to figure out how to eat it. (Remove the lobster parts; start with the cheeks. Leave the knife in.)

I have to admit I didn't eat much of it--I was too fascinated with the presentation. I played with it more than anything. It was delicious, and fatty, and tender, and crunchy-burnt on the outside, but I was preoccupied with the various technical challenges eating such a thing presented. (What happened to the brain? Did they take out the eyeballs, or did they bake away? Ooh, look, the jawbone comes right out! And there are teeth still attached to it! Is that the tongue? Gosh, the ears have a lot of cartilage. Do I eat that part? I wonder how you eat the nose? Should the nose be eaten? And so on.)

I got the world's largest doggie bag to take the copious leftovers home with me--I asked for everything, including the bones and lobster shells (so I could make stock, but also so I could completely deconstruct the dish at home).

Here's the carnage of leftovers:

Other things to know about Au Pied du Cochon:

It's crowded, small, and loud. Definitely not the laid-back, hip, fine dining atmosphere of DNA. We also had the duck charcuterie and a buckwheat-pancake-maple-syrup thing with a big hunk of foie gras on top. I have to say neither one of those dishes impressed me. Also the waiter assured me that the pig head for two was not an abnormal amount of food. That was SUCH a lie.

I would go back, but only if I got an earlier reservation, at an actual table instead of at the bar, and I would order more foie gras-laden dishes, and not listen to the waiter when I asked for recommendations.

Anthony Bourdain ate here.

The Other Place Worth Mentioning:

Dieu Du Ciel, which makes its own craft beers. All of the ones we tried were delicious.

And Marche Jean-Talon, the city's big farmer's market.

The Moral of the Story:

We'll be back. It was only a five-and-a-half-hour drive, meaning much of Eastern Canada is well within weekend road trip distance (everything from Toronto to Newfoundland). The dining in Montreal is world-class, and it's a very European kind of city. And I wasn't made to feel like a retard for not being able to speak French.

I also found one of my most favorite wines in the whole world, Laughing Stock, which is not exported to the US and can only be bought in Canada, so I'll have to go back to get more of it.

When presented with the opportunity to eat weird things, I will. Bless my husband for completely going along with that and eating everything that I did. (He liked all of it as much as I did.) I married a good one.

I really love good wine. And eating. I really love eating.

The end.

Gardening

We're having a heat wave here in MA--it might get all the way up to 50 degrees by Friday. I never thought the sound of melting snow would be so glorious.

I still don't think I'll see grass in my backyard before April, but it's a relief to see the tops of the stone pillars and scrubby bushes again.

So this has got me thinking about gardening.

My sister sent me some leftover seeds from her garden last year--several different kinds of tomatoes and peppers, cucumbers, and various herbs. I filled that out with a seed order for the rest of the herbs, some additional tomatoes and peppers, greens (spinach, arugula, kale, chard, mache, sorrel), corn, peas, bush beans, beets, pie pumpkins, carrots, butternut squash, zucchini, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, leeks, scallions and strawberries. The full complement of herbs will include three different kinds of basil (regular, purple, Thai), oregano, sage, rosemary, chives, mint, borage, chervil, cilantro, dill, marjoram, tarragon, thyme, catnip and catgrass, two different kinds of parsley, and lavendar. I threw in blue hyssop and nasturtiums, as well. Blue hyssop will attract bees and butterflies, and the nasturtiums are edible flowers.

A good all-around garden, no? Plus I still have all those containers from my patio garden in San Diego, so the herbs can go in there for close-to-year-round harvesting.

So, my first question is:

Should I continue my CSA membership through the summer?

Logic would dictate yes, since if the garden doesn't take off, I'll still have fresh fruits and vegetables all summer long. (And the membership runs from May to November.) But it's an additional cost, obviously, and I fear being up to my eyeballs in greenery and vegetables by July. Perhaps I'll continue the membership for this year, see how everything does, and adjust accordingly next year.

And the next question is:

How and when should I start all these seeds?

The sunroom is the obvious choice for seed starting, since it gets the most direct sunlight and it's out of the way. But it's COLD in there this time of year. I'd either have to heat the room (an exhorbitant cost, given the three glass walls) or keep the seeds on heating pads constantly--and I don't know if that would be enough, given the 40-degree ambient temperature. Also, given that I couldn't put the plants into the ground until (I'm assuming) late May at the earliest, do I start those now? Or wait a bit, and hope the sunroom warms up a tad?

Either way I'm starting the herbs and the cold-weather crops now.

Any gardeners out there, feel free to weigh in...

We're finally going somewhere!

Montreal, to be precise!

It's been a long time coming. Not Montreal per se, but just the idea of the two of us going somewhere. Somewhere new, that is, and preferably out of the country. I suppose since it'll be the first time we've traveled together since the wedding, to a place not involving family or friends, you could call it our honeymoon. :-) (Though it's only two days, so maybe I'll save the "honeymoon" moniker for a longer trip.)

We'll get a little bit of  money back from the IRS this year, and we're finally getting to the point where we'll have a wee bit of breathing room in the budget. Naturally, my first thought was, "OMG, we have to go someplace f#*&%ing WARM!!!!!!!" Then I thought, well, really I should be fiscally responsible and put that money toward debt repayment. Then I thought, f*ck that sh*t, I'm going someplace dammit. Then I realized that our vacation time for the year is already spoken for, so we wouldn't be able to take a week or even a few days to go on this magical IRS-refund-funded journey. And I should really be fiscally responsible. Then there was more swearing.

And I despaired, because I didn't want to break the string. Every year since 2004, I've gone somewhere. 2004: Jamaica, Las Vegas and Aruba. 2005: A banner year, Brussels, Germany/Italy/France/Switzerland, and Hawaii (and that was enough to count into 2006. Also 2006: San Francisco). 2007: Rome. 2008: Mardi Gras and Buenos Aires. 2009: road trip. 2010: We got married, and we'll count that as a trip. So 2011: had to go somewhere.

But given the lack of vacation time, it looked like we would just go into NYC for the long weekend and see some shows. Which is an excellent way to spend both time and money, don't get me wrong, but would not scratch the travel itch.

So instead, we'll drive into Montreal for the long weekend. I mean, it can't be any colder or snowier than it is here right now (and we'll get off-season rates that way). And we can drive there, and we can stay in a really nice B&B and have a couple of great meals, and see new things, and be all cultured and whatnot, and Canada counts as a different country. (Barely, I know, but we'll have to bring our passports and speak French, so I'm counting it.) And because we won't have to fly and it's just a couple of days, we can go somewhere AND be fiscally responsible.

I really need to get out of here for a couple of days, and I'm sure my hubby will second that. Work is hectic, the weather is brutal, and we're both getting a bit of cabin fever. A long weekend away from it all will be just what the doctor ordered.

If the weather screws this up, I'm stealing a tank from the National Guard and going anyway.

There's still nearly five feet of snow on the ground.

And that's all I can say about that without screaming.

Two bright spots: I've recently discovered Groupon. Love. It.

I've also recently discovered Travel Hacking Cartel. It's a paid subscription, which I'm not too sure about, but I love the idea of collecting bajillions of frequent-flier miles (and not by flying). I'll be testing it in the upcoming weeks, to see how many frequent-flier miles I can accumulate without getting new credit cards. Goodness knows I could use some free travel right about now.

Meanwhile, I'll be saving up for this house. This will be the family compound.

Theatre review: Afterlife: A Ghost Story

"You can’t reckon with me."
--The Ocean
“There’s something about looking at what’s left.”
--Connor

Steve Yockey’s Afterlife: A Ghost Story at New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, MA, has a pitch-perfect first act. The second act is so different as to be almost an entirely separate play.

I loved the first act. Connor (Thomas Piper) and Danielle (Marianna Bassham) are a young married couple, boarding up their beach house before a big storm. We know something is very wrong—Danielle is brittle and strange, Connor desperate to draw her out of her shell but failing on every level. Slowly, we figure out that their three-year-old son has recently drowned—in the very ocean their house overlooks. They’re boarding it up largely because Danielle can’t bear to live there anymore. And as she starts hearing her son’s cries on the wind, we fear she’s losing it altogether.

The production gets the grief exactly right, both in the couple’s tension and their raw emotionality. That’s how deep grief feels—the world seems fantastically remote. You can’t engage on any level with anything meaningful, and yet everything feels raw. Every emotion gets buried out of sight, pushed away, because if one strays and gets to the surface, the fountain of grief will erupt. Danielle holds it together because she’s largely anesthetized herself. Connor, however, wants to reengage with the world; Danielle resists because she knows how much that will hurt. The act is a tug of war between them, and eventually, that fountain of grief and anger does erupt, just as the storm hits.

Oh, but then. The second act.

For the second act, the carefully constructed realism disappears (both literally and figuratively, as the house set is rolled back). The stage is divided into three playing areas, consisting of a young man who may be the grown-up version of Connor and Danielle’s drowned son; a blindfolded and immobile Connor, washed up on some snowy beach; and Danielle, who has found her way from a storm into the home of two strange ladies, one who sews constantly and the other who drinks a lot of tea. The three of them (Connor, Danielle and son) are each in some separate, individual, timeless version of purgatory, I suppose. The son tries to write letters to his parents, but the postman rips them up every day; Connor is visited by a giant talking black bird, who urges him to “let go”; and Danielle realizes the tea-drinking old woman is actually the embodiment of the ocean that took her son. And they’re all trapped in their own spheres, with no way to move on or find the others.

Got all that?

I appreciate what playwright Yockey is trying to convey, and I also appreciate the lyrical language and lush, dreamy imagery of the play. But I would have much rather seen a longer version of the first act. He seemed to do so much better with characters and a story grounded in realism. The second act, with barely anything to anchor it to the first act, offered nothing in the way of either character or story development, and felt fractured from the start.

That being said, it’s worth sitting through the second act just to see the first. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a moving and accurate portrayal of anguish. Actors Thomas Piper and Marianna Bassham have a great chemistry together, and director Kate Warner keeps that first act on a razor’s edge. The set, lighting and sound designs (Cristina Todesco, Karen Parsons, and David Remedios) are all equally lush and dreamy, providing a beautiful counterpoint to the heavy emotion of the first act and keeping the second act from being completely nonsensical. Dale Place as the mysterious Postman, is also noteworthy as the giant black bird (using an ingenious giant puppet designed by Pandora Andrea Gastelum).

Overall, I enjoyed the play. It was my first time at New Rep, and I loved the space. (Free parking didn’t hurt.) I’m excited to see their next offering, Theresa Rebeck’s DollHouse beginning February 27th.


Afterlife: A Ghost Story Written by Steve Yockey
Directed by Kate Warner With Marianna Bassham (Danielle), Adrianne Krstansky (The Proprietress), Georgia Lyman (The Seamstree), Karl Baker Olson (Young Man), Thomas Piper (Connor) and Dale Place (Postman/Black Bird)
Set Design: Cristina Todesco
Lighting Design: Karen Parsons
Sound Design: David Remedios
Costume Design: Frances Nelson McSherry
Running Time: Two hours with one fifteen-minute intermission
New Repertory Theatre, at the Arsenal Center for the Arts; 321 Arsenal St, Watertown, MA
Tickets begin at $28
Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday 8 pm, Saturday 3 pm and 8 pm, Sunday 2 pm
January 16 – February 6, 2011